The film is dedicated to Russian actress Yekaterina Golubeva who died on August 14, 2011 (her photo is displayed during the end credits of the film). Yekaterina, whom first name is sometime spelled Katerina, was Leos Carax’s partner in real life and played in numerous films, including Carax’s Pola X (1999), Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2002) and Claire Denis’s L’intrus (2004). In Holy Motors, their daughter Nastya Golubeva-Carax plays the young girl who gets picked up by her father (Denis Lavant) after a party. In French see libération: “Décès de l’actrice Katerina Golubeva” August 18, 2011. In English see British Film Institute: “Obituary – Yekaterina Golubeva” by David Thompson,

There’s no doubt in my mind that David Hudson writes the most exhaustive and comprehensive reviews roundup there is when it comes to movies. He used to write at MUBI but has since moved to Fandor. As of now, he has written three roundups about Carax’s Holy Motors:

Our first round of reviews came straight from that Cannes premiere, the second from the film’s run in the U.K., coinciding with its engagement at the New York Film Festival. Today, Holy Motors opens in New York at Film Forum and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and, because it’s one of the cinematic events of the year, here we go round again.

Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling.

It’s not for the faint-hearted or anyone who sets high store by conventional narrative logic. Like an aggressively doolally circus showman, Carax shoves us into our seats for an amusement-park ride through the subconscious, making pit-stops wherever he feels like it.

Holy Motors could be a multiple-personality disorder of the spirit, a tragicomic shattering of the self, caused by some catastrophe that has happened just out of sight, just beyond the reach of memory. But it’s quite possible it’s just bravura, imagination, fun. This is the theory I favour. It’s pure pleasure.

It is, I think, a marvellous movie, vivid, witty, varied, puzzling, though not without its longueurs, and it uses the cinema itself as a metaphor for the journey of life, which some level-headed Anglo-Saxon audiences may find deeply irritating.

It’s a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you’re to do once you’re there. Sometimes you may be amazed or delighted; other times, you may feel restless or uninterested.

It’s a movie that arises after the end of cinema, a phoenix of a new cinema. Few films have dramatized as wisely and as poignantly the art that, like the two reels at each end of the camera and the projector, gives with one hand and takes with the other. And few films give so harrowing a sense of staring death in the face and so exhilarating a sense of coming back to tell the tale with a self-deprecating whimsy.

Whatever the modernist principle here of making the mechanism visible, drawing all of a plastic society’s suppressed elements of industry, the underclass, and bodily functions back to the surface to wreck mayhem (as in Cosmopolis), the conceit here seems basically that these ruffians have themselves been incorporated into the mechanics like automatons at a theme park, that even their visibility is definitive condition as icons in the city’s spectacle-machine.